When 1971 was drawing to a close, I received a paper containing a strange story. This story was to haunt us repeatedly throughout the long, drawn-out battle. It was a story resembling science fiction -- bizarre and unbelievable. There are those who warned me not to even mention this story, and I can appreciate why. On the other hand, the task of a hitorian is not to relate thins as they should have happened, but as they actually did happen.
What did happen was that this crazy story appeared just like Kilroy in the Second World War, even though no one ever met him. So, with apologies to my friends, I still include Perkins. Perkins did happen, even if he perhaps never existed. The Perkins saga was different from other fluoride stories.
The story of industries hoodwinking the public into buying a pollutant as medicine is simply a 'whodunnit'. Grotesque though it may sound, it is no more than 'the consumer fraud of this polluted century' (as described in Fluoridation and Truth Decay by Gladys Caldwell). But the story I now read was different: it gave one the cold shivers. It told of a chemical engineer, Mr. Perkins, who related how immediately after the Second World War he was one the Americans put into the well-known IG Farben Company in Germany. There he discovered that IG Farben had developed plans during the war to fluoridate the occupied countries, because it had been found that fluoridation caused slight damage to a specific part of the brain. This damage had a very particular effect. It made it more difficult for the person affected to defend his freedom. He became more docile towards authority.
Scientists in the camps of both the opponents and proponents have always dismissed this story as mere poppycock, but it had a life of its own and reared its head time and again. It fed the suspicions of many people that 'there was more to fluoridation than meets the eye'.
As far as I know, there is no one who hs done any serious research into whether the fluoridated person is really more docile, easier to rule, more impressed by authority than the non-fluoridated one. There is, though, one peculiar thing: every Dutch doctor has a medical reference book listing all the current remedies. I have in front of me the book for 1984. One of the chapters is entitled 'Tranquilisers'. Looking at the 'minor tranquillisers' I find twenty-four substances: their chemical formulae do not show any connection with fluoride. However, there is also a heading 'major tranquillisers'. Of those there are twenty-seven, and seven of them are a fluoride compound. One of these is semap. It is one of the strongest anti-psychotic substances we know. This means that twenty-five per cent of the major tranquillisers are connected with floride. I do not draw any conclusions. The only thing one can say at this point is, with Alice: 'curiouser and curiouser!'
from pages 51-52 of Hans Moolenburgh, Fluoride: The Freedom Fight, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1987.